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Visit Inverary Castle in Argyll, Scotland, and the welcoming guides will tell you stories of hauntings in the area, including a White Lady who appears on a nearby bridge and inside houses on the Inverary estate. A ghostly galleon trad­itionally materialises above Loch Fyne as a death warning to the Dukes of Argyll and other family members. Unusual incidents have also been reported within the castle itself, but perhaps the most remarkable aspect is the evol­ution of its most famous ghost from an old man into a young boy – within a space of 75 years.

This spectre is the phantom harper, whose music also acts as a death warning to the family. In 1949, the 10th Duke of Argyll was dying at the castle, attended by a doctor and a local minister. Suddenly, the sound of harp music was heard from an adjoining room. The doctor and minister both left the bedside briefly to see who might be playing an instrument. On their return, the Duke had died.

According to the story most frequently told today (and included on the castle’s own website) the spectral harper is a young boy who was murdered in 1644, during an attack on the castle led by James Graham, Marquis of Monstrose. The website claims “a young Irish boy of 12 or 13 employed to play the harp” was killed and dismembered, with his body parts thrown on the bed in the MacArthur Room. Thereafter, his ghost was said to haunt the room.

However, an account published nearly 75 years ago states that the ghostly harper is not a butchered boy at all, but the shade of an elderly man. The first story contained in Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book (1936) is entitled “The Harper of Inverary”, and identifies the phantom harper as a “poor old man” hanged from a tree outside the castle by Montrose’s men. The ghost was also described as a “little man” seen in the gallery in 1914 by Lady Elspeth, the sister of the then Duke. Other later witnesses include Lady George Campbell who saw the figure in the Blue Room of the Castle around 1918. In October 1922, sounds like books being thrown around were heard before the funeral of the Marquis of Bredalbane, and doors opened by themselves. These manifestations were ascribed by the family to “the old man”, again suggesting the ghostly harper was not considered to be a boy.

The harping tradition died out in the 18th century with the collapse of the clan system. Minstrels were often elderly in Scottish tradition, and might be accompanied by children (see The Lay of the Last Minstrel by Sir Walter Scott, where the minstrel with “withered cheek” and “tresses grey” has only “an orphan boy” as companion). Folklore of castles and ancestral homes also commonly tells of boyish spirits who act as household familiars and behave like polter­geists when offended. (See “Brownie, Incubus and Polter­geist” by George Owen in International Journal of Parapsychology, Autumn 1964, pp455–472.) Possibly the two traditions became confused, or the small stature of the Inverary ghost led to it being mistakenly re-classified as a boy.

A likely explanation is that the stories of the elderly harper have become muddled with the grotesque boy shown in a 17th-century Dutch painting at the castle. Known as The Singing Boy, it hangs on the wall of the haunted bedroom. The picture was heartily disliked by Ian, 12th Duke of Argyll, or Mac Cailein Mhor as he was known in the Highlands, Chief of the Clan Campbell. In life, the Duke would turn the painting to face the wall whenever possible. The Duke died unexpectedly in London on 21 April 2001, aged 63, during heart surgery. Soon after his death, The Singing Boy painting was found to have been mysteriously thrown to the floor, face downwards (damage to the frame caused by the fall is still noticeable). This was taken as a sign of the Duke’s presence and his continuing post mortem disapproval of the picture.